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 but in the end it had passed by purchase to the Abbey of St Gallen. The inhabitants of Wildhaus had gained the rights of electing their village bailiff and choosing their own village priest. Zwingli's father held the former, and his uncle Bartholomew the latter, office; when this uncle (1487) became rural dean and rector of Wesen on the Lake of Wallenstadt, the young boy, already destined for clerical life, went with him. His famfly was thus respected and versed in civil and ecclesiastical matters; on the mother's side, too, one uncle was Abbot of Fischingen, and another relative Abbot of Old St John's, near Wesen. In 1494 Zwingli was sent to Basel to be under Gregory Bünzli, and in 1498 to Bern, where his teacher was Heinrich Wölflin (Lupulus), then the most famous humanist in Switzerland. He was moved from Bern, lest the Dominicans should secure him as a novice, and he is next found at Vienna, where his classical bent was strengthened. In 1502 he returned to Basel where, in 1504, he graduated as Bachelor; the University was not then at its best, but the city was still a centre of Swiss life and of the trade in books; he became a teacher at St Martin's School, and thus his mind was early trained in the habit of instruction. In 1506 he was called to the charge of Glarus, an important town with three outlying hamlets, and was ordained priest at Constance.

The impulses forming his character had been simple: the democratic spirit of a self-governing village with traditions of its struggles-in 1490 he must have seen the Abbot of St Gallen appear with a small army to reduce his subjects to obedience; the training of the parish priest with a sense of responsibility (discharged as he even then significantly held mainly by preaching); the life of the village with its many activities of a smaller kind. But stronger than all these was his humanistic training, which at Glarus he had time to follow out. Traces of the current classical taste are seen in him to the end: one of these was his belief in the divine inspiration of Cato and other ancients with their high ideal of patriotism; hence, too, came his deep interest in the salvation of the great ancients who lived before Christ. But he was a humanist who never sought a patron.

Before he came to Glarus he had been under the influence of Thomas Wyttenbach (1505-6), a lecturer at Basel, from whom he had learnt the evils of Indulgences and the authority of the Bible. These crude ideas of reform were not however confined to Wyttenbach, and it was only in order to minimise his debt to Luther that Zwingli mentions this earlier indebtedness. But he had made closer acquaintance with Church abuses; for Heinrich Göldli, a Swiss of the Papal Guard and a trafficker in benefices, had bought the reversion of Glarus, and Zwingli had to pay him a pension of 100 gulden before entering upon his charge.

In classics Erasmus was his guide; good letters and sound theology were to go together; the spirit of the German Renaissance was to inspire theology; but of deep personal religion Zwingli at this stage was